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I’m kind of glad that Rambo: The Video Game is looking painfully generic. I mean, who better to carry the torch of ceaseless neckshank killsplosions than the man we all colloquially associate with the tropedemic anyway? (If you’d asked me a week ago, I would’ve said Michael Bay, but now I want a game where he kills people with crazy handshake-legswing combos.) It’s almost poetic, insofar as something I would consider the opposite of poetry can be poetic. But Rambo: The Video Game’s case of terminal generitis is also kind of a shame, given that the tense nature of the original film could’ve made for a pretty interesting videogame. Oh well, though. At least they totally got the mullet right.

Well, it at least looks like stealth is an option… sometimes. And hey, you’ve got a bow, and there’s climbing. Maybe it’ll be kinda Tomb-Raider-y? Or maybe, completely, absolutely not.

You know what I’d really like? A game about Sylvester Stallone’s insane physical abuse of his own body. Seriously. Even at age Still Shockingly Ripped For Being 67, he insists on performing his own stunts. Most recently, he broke his neck during the filming of the first Expendables, but past performances saw him break, well, pretty much everything else.

He’s a madman, clearly. I would love to play a physics-based game about flinging his creaking carcass into progressively more ridiculous Hollywood machinations. In between stunts, you’d have to manage his recovery, arrange gigs, and research new technology like adamantium skeletons. I would call it Sylvester Stallone Simutilator 2014. Thoughts?

I think you are most mistaken in your correspondence. Where you have written “Mortal Kombat”, I believe you do, in fact, mean “Street Fighter”. The confusion is quite understandable, since both games and films were competing rivals at the time.

Glad that I was able to bring this grave error to your attention,
Sir Panthera Leo

Star Wars: TIE Fighter and Star Wars: X-Wing? Although arguably, they weren’t adaptations of the movie, but just a selection of the action sequences that were a good fit for computer games of that era.

This is on-rails in the sense of old shooters like Virtua Cop etc. You won’t control the movement at all, just point at stuff and click the mouse. Tomb Raider and other contemporary shooters bashed for their linearity are almost open world compared to this:).

Dear lord, woe is this trailer… a particularly fine bit is stepping out of the jungle with 3+ assailants… and you don’t get instantly shot let alone given time to saunter over while reloading of course to only then begin to shoot them.

I come from the future just to inform you that this game stablished a precedent on the concept of what we understand by videogames nowadays. A real gem, truly inspirational, the ultimate Citizen Kane of videogames.

This is were truly to be a Rambo game, or, in fact, any game based upon 1980’s action movies, you should never have to reload and no matter how many bullets are shot at you, the most you should get is the odd flesh wound. Nothing else would work.

Sometimes when I look at these game videos, I wonder if the creators were trying to be ironically funny. It’s pretty apparent that Rambo is not modeled very well, but the video seems to emphasize showing closeups of his face. It’s like the marketing team wants to show off how bad the game looks.

A shame. Let’s not allow ourselves to forget that First Blood is an excellent film. Quite absurd really how the Rambo franchise developed.

Go insane, then go be a hero!
Broadly speaking, quite interesting to look back now meta-textually. The business of violence. Hollywood mirroring Rambos plight in some ways. Quite a lot of depth there that I don’t have the skills to fully articulate. I think Hideo Kojima had a go in MGS2 to some extent.

Yeah it’s so odd. The first film is this thoughful piece about a broken war veteran that goes a bit loopy and has to be talked down from killing some police officers. Its not a film that should ever have had a sequel.

Yeah Rambo 1 is one of the best anti-war films ever made. It’s entire message is “look at what we’re doing to our soldiers by sending them into war and not providing for them when they come back”. Rambo himself is absolutely not portrayed as a hero – he’s portrayed as the thing society should avoid creating.
The whole “RAMBO LOVES TO KILL IT IS AWESOME YEAH!” thing the sequels have (although the latest one doesn’t really?) is just absurd and sad.